SEER-Medicare: Privacy & Confidentiality Issues

NCI, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the SEER staff have
great appreciation for the potentially sensitive nature of data about persons
with cancer and the need to respect the privacy of patients and providers
included in the SEER-Medicare data. In order to protect the SEER-Medicare data,
NCI has obtained a Certificate of
Confidentiality (CoC), which allows NCI and its contractors who have access
to the data to refuse disclosure of identifying information on research
participants (e.g., individual patients and individual providers) in any civil,
criminal, administrative, legislative, or other proceeding, whether at the
federal, state, or local level. Per this Certificate, NCI considers individual
providers (e.g., physicians and other health care personnel) to be protected
research participants; therefore, unencrypted identifiers for individual
providers are no longer released.

Additional SEER-Medicare policies and practices related to privacy are
described in this section: